Last night, Stephen Hawking died. We’re at the three year anniversary of Pratchett dying. There are special elections going on, leadership in some countries deciding that they’re going to rule for life, and a whole lot of strangeness going on.

I’m also coming up on a birthday, so that’s got me deep in thought as well.

Traditionally, I’ve clung to statistics and fiction as my buoy for hope. That long upward trend of the world improving, the one that reaches back before I was born. It was a position with the safety of the abstract. Numbers, trends, generalities. The world was, slowly, getting better. I was never of the position that we were done trying to improve, or that it was anything resembling evenly distributed. It was a nice thing to lean back on when the world seemed dark; even with the bad things in the world, we’re slowly getting better.

When that didn’t work, we had the other side of the coin for me. The future. Stories. Myths. Hawking and other scientists pushing the edges of what humanity knows, what we can grapple with, always wondering if some point of salvation or the way to improve or solve one problem or another might be just beyond that next discovery. Or Pratchett and fiction writers, asking questions and telling stories. Wondering what could happen, and trying to talk it through with us.

Last year didn’t feel like that world any more. Things seemed darker, for a lot of reasons. Events around the world wrenched at the core of me, the world was terrifying. I had to close myself off to the news, to the outside world. I’m not to proud to admit that I hid away for a spell, working on worlds that were made up, that were within my control. Turned out, that break was something I needed. Even with that, the rest of the world seeped in. Into my writing (as it so often does), and it couldn’t be kept at bay.

I think both of these men, and countless other men and women both gone and still with us, serve as a wonderfully small reminder that even when things are darkest, it is only through our efforts that the world can be better. Nothing improves unless those of us do whatever we can to improve our own little corner of the world.

]]>http://www.omichinski.com/hope-hawking-pratchett/feed/0368Terry Pratchetthttp://www.omichinski.com/2015-3-12-terry-pratchett/
http://www.omichinski.com/2015-3-12-terry-pratchett/#respondFri, 13 Mar 2015 04:35:31 +0000http://www.omichinski.com/2015/03/13/2015-3-12-terry-pratchett/I don’t know where else to put this. I am quite torn up over the death of Terry Pratchett and my heart goes out to everyone else who feels his loss, especially his family. We all knew it was coming, in that vague sense that it was over the next horizon or beyond that. It …

]]>I don’t know where else to put this. I am quite torn up over the death of Terry Pratchett and my heart goes out to everyone else who feels his loss, especially his family. We all knew it was coming, in that vague sense that it was over the next horizon or beyond that. It was a vague thing, amorphous and hiding in the distance of “someday.”

I think we’re all sharing our stories about him, the way we always do when a friend or family member dies. Its healthy, its part of what makes us human. We remember the good times, and the bad, and we hurt for someone being taken from us. They’re almost always taken too soon. So, in my own sense of vanity or something, I’m going to share my small story about Terry Pratchett, a small tribute to thank him for the wonderful worlds he’s created.

When I was a teen, I got sent off to boarding school. Looking back now, it was obviously the right thing to do. In the way that we don’t usually get to see that there was an obvious right and an obvious wrong answer. I didn’t see it as the right answer at the time. I thought it was terrible. I was homesick and around a bunch of other homesick boys. This meant you couldn’t cry, or at least you couldn’t be caught crying. I had left behind the people I knew, the town that I had just felt that I was settling into from a previous move, and I was feeling more than a little sorry for myself.

Into that time of feeling sorry for myself, one of the teachers at the boarding school gave me a Terry Pratchett book. My first one was Jingo. This is going to seem weird, but before that book I didn’t realize that you could write a book that was both funny and not-funny. This was my relatively simplistic way of appreciating that Pratchett could present worlds that were serious, meaningful, and powerful, but also make you laugh the whole way through. Through humour he tackled issues, and used a flat disc of a world as a mirror for our own.

That book led to another, then another, and by the end of the year I had read nearly every book he had published by that time. These books opened me up to other new books; it was like reaching some second renaissance in my reading (the first having been in grade three when I read over 100 books in the course of a school year). But more than that, it gave me an opportunity to make new friends again. To get outside of feeling sorry for myself and to quit being so much of an angst ridden teen.

I look back now and, well, I’m sad. Most of those friendships are gone now; slipped away in the passing of time and the inevitable march of things getting in the way. Disagreements or fights or even just apathy. They weasel their way in to your life and we all are guilty of letting it happen sometimes.

But I remember that paperback with the colourful cover on it, the name I didn’t recognize across the front cover in giant letters, the first pages already taking themselves seriously but also taking the piss. It was glorious, and it changed me. Pieces got rearranged.

Sir Terry Pratchett, I know you’ll be missed by me and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of others. Thank you. For everything.